


Looking Back

by ThymeAtlas



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: Gen, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-19
Updated: 2016-03-19
Packaged: 2018-05-27 15:51:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6290608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThymeAtlas/pseuds/ThymeAtlas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here are some facts about Ben Wyatt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Looking Back

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes u wake up in the middle of the night & just gotta write 573 words abt a character u over relate to

Here are some facts about Ben Wyatt:

He learned about Benjamin Franklin in 4th grade when he studied electricity. He put his hands on the plasma globe his teacher kept in the corner of the classroom and didn’t jump when the electricity reached out to touch his hands. He wondered what it would be like to break away the plastic and feel the sparks for real. He checked a biography on Franklin out of the school library, and that night he dreamed of a storm and a constant electricity flowing through him. He whispered “Ben, Ben, Ben,” out loud to himself the next morning, like it was something he could keep.

He liked sports because he liked numbers; he would sit with his graphing paper in front of the TV and make charts of the scores, doodling in the margins. He made up statistics for his favorite players and compared them to the cards he would buy from the game shop near the library. He would come home with books in his arms and cards weighing down his jacket pockets.

He grew up in the cold, knuckles dry and cracking and the sharp wind piercing the back of his throat, hurting his lungs more than the binder did after eight hours. He loved skating, dressing in layers and gliding across the ice, puffs of hot air left behind him on the exhale. His mom signed him up for figure skating when he was younger; he switched to hockey later but he couldn’t keep up with the bigger boys, couldn’t work well with a team. He went to the roller rink on the edge of town instead of going to practice, and he almost always had the floor to himself. The music was too loud, pop hits that he hated, but when he skated fast enough he could drown it out, forwards, backwards, doing jumps and spins. He was too shy to ever talk to the bored teens who worked there but it was good anyway. He breathed in and out and wished that hockey was like this.

He would wake up early when he was younger to catch every minute of Saturday morning cartoons. He watched Scooby Doo and Transformers and Dragonball, tried to draw the characters next to the charts on his graphing paper but they never looked right. When he was older he would steal the VCR from the main room in the middle of the night and hook it up to the tiny TV he found one day by the side of the road. He would stay up until 4 in the morning watching Star Wars and Real Genius and War Games until the tapes wore out. He would buy tapes in packs of five from the drug store down the street and record episodes of Star Trek. He stayed in his room a lot during his teens, doing math homework with the TV on in the background, mostly static at the end of its life.

He thinks about his childhood sometimes, while eating in the diner or filing paperwork or lying in bed, his arm on Leslie’s waist. He thinks about being that kid who talked too much about politics and cartoons and not about anything else, about being the only student who liked the overenthusiastic calculus teacher, about constantly feeling out of his element and managing to succeed anyway. And then he blinks, shifts, pulls her closer.


End file.
